Author: Kevin Myers
Publication: The Independent
Date: August 5, 2009
URL: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/its-time-to-dispense-with-the-voodoo-politics-of-the-good-condom-and-the-guilty-foreskin-1850900.html
Voodoo is an African word, but not an African
monopoly. Every society has its own voodoo -- a fear of some mysterious ailment
which can only be cured by magical means.
The latest proposal by the World Health Organisation
to control the AIDS epidemic in Africa by circumcising males is just another
voodoo. However, the disproportionate number of women scientists urging this
"solution" does suggest a bizarre twist -- some feminists, for obvious,
if largely subconscious reasons, rather like the idea of male genital mutilation.
Furthermore, the hygiene argument (usually used tendentiously) justifying
male circumcision could equally apply to the female labia, and more especially,
to the fingernails of both sexes.
About a year ago, I got into a spot of bother
when I wrote that one of Africa's problems lay in its large numbers of priapic
young male layabouts. It's an obvious truth, but ours is not a society which
likes dealing with obvious truths, preferring to take comfort in the pious
voodoo-fictions that Africa's problems are caused by European imperialism,
apartheid and the lack of western aid.
If I were to repeat that column today, not
many would care to differ, never mind call me a Nazi, as some brainless cretin
in 'The Irish Daily Mail' did, nor seek to get me imprisoned, as did another
equally brainless cretin from the National Migrant Council. For a recent survey
of South African men has shown that 28pc of them had raped a woman or girl,
and 3pc had raped a man or a boy. Almost half of these rapists had raped more
than once, and nearly 75pc of them were under 20 at the time of their first
rape. Moreover, the survey showed men who raped were also most likely to consort
with prostitutes, and were less likely to use condoms.
Well, one reassuring aspect of all this is
that rapists were twice as likely as non-rapists to die from AIDS. The downside
is that so too were their victims, though in dear old South Africa, they are
not always seen as victims. When the president, the gallant Jacob Zuma, was
being tried for rape, his supporters gathered outside the courthouse, verbally
abusing his HIV-infected accuser, singing, "Burn the bitch, burn the
bitch". (How very charming. And how very less circumspectly the western
media would have treated these stories if the leader accused of rape had been
an Afrikaaner, and the ethnic group that had admitted to 28pc levels of rape,
and had so colourfully abused the accuser, had been white).
I grow weary here, so let me conclude with
this. A six-month-old baby who was gang raped in North Cape a couple of years
ago (many African men believing that sex with a virgin can cure a man of AIDS)
had subsequently to have a colostomy. The rapists walked free. And the trade
union Solidarity reports that a child is raped every three minutes in South
Africa. Now please, please, tell me what difference the presence or absence
of a flap of skin on the penis can possibly make to the health of these African
women and children?
Surveys in Uganda suggest that transmission
rates of HIV/AIDS from women to circumcised men in consensual sex are 50pc
those of uncircumcised. But a further -- and almost Mengelianly ghoulish experiment
-- showed that circumcised men with HIV infected their partners at the same
rate as did uncircumcised men. Well, what a surprise: and I trust the people
who conducted these experiments, instead of telling the infected to refrain
from penetrative sex completely, were satisfied with the outcome.
It's deeply unfashionable to say this, but
the Pope was right when he insisted that condoms are not the answer to Africa's
AIDS pandemic. For condoms have to be used every time -- and even then, they
have a failure rate of 10pc.
This is a small problem when condoms are used
as contraceptives, because the chances are that these accidents will happen
when the woman is not fertile. But she is always vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. After
having had safe condom-sex nine times, actuarially, what are her chances of
completing an uninfected sexual act? How many days does it take healthy young
people to have sex 10 times?
How are intact condoms to be distributed thro-ughout
the townships and the remote villages of sub-Saharan Africa? Finally, how
many of the 28pc of South African hearties who rape will henceforth thoughtfully
don a condom beforehand?
It's all voodoo: the voodoo of the good condom,
and the voodoo of the guilty foreskin. And this latter is, paradoxically,
a voodoo that is common to the most advanced societies in the world -- the
US, Israel -- and the most backward, Somalia and Sudan.
It is one thing for an adult to choose to
be circumcised, though little good will it do him if he chooses then to have
unprotected promiscuous sex (as many newly-circumcised African males do).
It is quite another thing for the World Health Organisation to encourage people
to rob little boys of their foreskins for "public health" reasons.
To do that is to mutilate him forever, and
all in the name of a very dangerous ancient/modern voodoo, that this year
has killed 53 boys in Cape Province alone.
